In this episode of Volatile Trajectories, you’ll hear from Darin Barney, Walter Gordon and Bob Johnson about how they define and defy the boundaries that exist between the interior and exterior of the university.
Walter Gordon is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow in the department of English at Stanford University, where he studies African American literature, energy, and the environment. Walter was recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Public Energy Humanities at the University of Alberta. He is currently working on a book titled Prime Movers: Energy and Modernity in African American Literature, which tracks the interlinked literary histories of King Coal and Jim Crow, among other entanglements of race and energy. Darin Barney is Professor and Grierson Chair in Communication Studies at McGill University. Barney’s research concerns the forms and media of politics at the intersection of materials, energy, infrastructure and environments. His current work involves an investigation of emerging formats for the storage, transportation and use of bitumen in the Canadian oil patch, and infrastructural transformations in the Canadian grain sector. And Bob Johnson is author of Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the Making of American Culture and Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy. His current work takes on the prevailing empiricist and alternative social constructivist paradigms in climate studies to reconceive climate as a hybridized object.
Their conversation is a stirring confrontation with what Darin calls “institutionalized knowledge practice” and the “agony” of the obvious contradiction between occupying sites of hegemonic power and actively working against what Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “prestige machine” of academia. Barney talks about the nascent field of the “energy humanities” as a site of knowledge production where this conflict is felt in a particularly explosive way, and suggests that can be a field where experts in energy transition embrace the goal of producing a more oppositional, politically-inflected and radically inclusive iteration of the university.
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